"He's that muckle I cannot get him in, sir," cried the lad after a time.
But the Colonel could not wait.
"Nonsense," he said. "Get his head in. I can't stop here all night."
Then came the not uncommon result of trying to net a big fish in an uncertain light; the rim of the net fouled the gut cast, and away went the fish. It would spoil the story not to tell the rest of it in Sir Herbert Maxwell's own words.
"The Colonel did not realise the magnitude of his disaster until two or three weeks later, when he happened to be waiting for a train at St. Boswells Station. The porter came to him and said:
"'Hae ye ony mind, Colonel, o' yon big fush ye slippit in the Tod Holes yon nicht?'
"'Oh, I mind him well,' replied the Colonel; 'a good lump of a fish he was, I believe, but I never saw him rightly.'
"'Ay,' said the other dryly; 'yon wad be the biggest sawmon that ever cam oot o' the water o' Tweed, I'm thinking.'
"'Why, what do you know about him?' asked the Colonel.
"'Oh, I ken fine aboot the ae half o' him, ony way,' replied the porter. 'Ye see, there was twa lads clappit amang the trees below the Wallace statue forenenst ye, waiting till it was dark to set a cairn net, ye ken. Weel, didna they see you coming doun the water taigled wi' a fish? And when ye cam to the Tod Holes, they saw ye loss him, and they got a visee o' the water he made coming into the east bank, ye ken. There's a wee bit cairn there, ye ken, wi' a piece lound water ahint it, where they jaloused the fish wad rest himsel a wee. Weel, they waited till it was mirk night, and then they jist whuppit the net round him, and they sune had him oot. He was that big he wadna gang into the bag they had wi' them; so they cuttit him in twa halves; and the tae half they brocht to the station here to gang by rail to Embro'. Weel, if the tither half was as big, yon fish bud to be seeventy pund weight; for the half o' him I weighed mysel, and it was better nor thirty-five pund. Ay, a gran' kipper!'"
Yet occasionally, in olden days, a salmon big as Tam Purdie's muckle kipper was got by rod and line. In 1815 Rob Kerss, the famous "Rob o' the Trows," hooked a leviathan in Makerstoun Water – the biggest fish, he said, that ever he saw; so big that it took even so great a master as Rob hours to land, and left him "clean dune oot." At last the fish lay, a magnificent monster, stretched on the shingle. With aching arms but thankful heart, Rob moved away a trifle to lift a stone wherewith to smite his captive over the head. And with that, Rob's back being partly turned, from the tail of his eye he saw the salmon give a wammle. In novels, it is usually "but the work of a moment" for the hero to turn and perform some noted feat. Here, alas! it was different. It was but the work of a moment, certainly, for Rob to turn, and to jump on the huge salmon. But there all resemblance to the typical hero ceased, for the line fouled his foot, and broke as it tripped him up; and before the fisherman knew where he was, he and the salmon were struggling together in deep water. It was only Rob that came out. Sic transit. Trust not a fish till the bag closes on him.
THE GHOST THAT DANCED AT JETHART
Six centuries before Edward the Peacemaker reigned over Britain, the people of Scotland knew the blessing of having for a King one who was known as "The King of Peace."
Alexander the Third was a child of eight when he inherited the Scottish crown, and was only two years older when he married the Princess Margaret, eldest daughter of Henry the Third of England. Even in his early boyhood the young King displayed a wisdom, an energy, and a forcefulness in his management of affairs that marked him for a great ruler, and made his royal father-in-law's fond vision of gradually gaining such an ascendancy over Scotland, that he might in time be able to claim that kingdom as an appanage of England, fade altogether away. Alexander had only recently come of age when he had to defend his country against her old enemies, the Norsemen, and his complete victory was a triumph for him and for his people. Nineteen years later, his only daughter, Margaret, married Eric, King of Norway, and the Scots saw peace for them and for their children smiling on them from every side. But if prosperity as a monarch was his, misfortune overshadowed King Alexander's private life. His wife died; his children died. His eldest son, born at Jedburgh, and married, as a lad, to a daughter of the Count of Flanders, died childless. His daughter, the young Queen of Norway, died the year after her marriage, leaving behind her the baby who has come down to us, even through chilly history, as a pitiful little figure, known as "The Maid of Norway."
In 1285 King Alexander was wifeless and childless, and the heir to the Scottish crown was his two-year-old grandchild in "Norroway ower the faem."
In the eyes of all his people the King's duty was plain. He was only forty-four, a brilliant parti for the daughter of any royal or noble house, and the Scots wished a man, not a maid, to rule over them. He must, obviously, marry again. Joleta, also called Yolande, daughter of the Count de Dreux, and a descendant of the Kings of France, was his chosen bride. She was of surpassing fairness, and even most of those who had harboured scruples with regard to the match, because the maid had been destined for a nunnery, forgot such scruples when they looked upon her beauty.
On All Saints' Day, 1285, the wedding – a more brilliant function than anything that had ever before been held in Scotland – was celebrated in Jedburgh Abbey. The little grey town on the Jed was packed with Scottish and French nobles and their retinues. Few were the noble houses that were not there represented, and the monks of Beauvais – the black-cloaked Augustinian friars from St. Quentin's Abbey – who held rule at the Abbey of Jedburgh in those days, must have had their ears gladdened by the constant sound of the French tongue coming from seigneur, squire, and page-boy who passed them on the causeway.
There was nothing awanting in pomp or in splendour at the royal wedding. The trees were shedding their leaves, the bracken and the heather on the moors were brown, and winds that swept across the Carter Bar and down from the Cheviots had a winter nip in them; but indoors there was warmth enough, and all the gorgeousness and feasting and merrymaking that the most exacting of guests could desire for the marriage of a great king. The banquet after the wedding was followed by a masque. Musicians ushered into the banqueting hall of the castle a gorgeously attired procession of dancers, many of them armed men. It was a radiant scene for the bright eyes of Queen Yolande. Lights flashed on swords and on armour, and on the sumptuous trappings and brilliant-coloured attire of lords and of ladies, for courts in those days looked like hedges of sweet-peas in the summer sun. The musicians played their best, the guests mingled gaily with the dancing mummers, and then, suddenly, above all the sounds of music and of revel, there arose a cry, a woman's cry, shrill and full of fear. What was that grisly figure that appeared amongst the dancers? – a grinning skeleton – a dancing Death. No masquer this, but a grim messenger from the Shades, bringing dire warning to one, at least, of that gay company. As it had come, so it vanished, but all the gaiety had gone from the merry throng. The ill-omened dancer had laid a chilly hand on the heart of many a wedding guest.
There were some who said it was a monkish trick, contrived for his own ends by one of the brethren from Beauvais, but, less than six months later, all Scotland believed that the skeleton masquer at Jedburgh had, indeed, come to warn an unfortunate land of its approaching doom.
On a dark March night of 1286, King Alexander rode along the rough cliff path between Burntisland and Kinghorn on a horse that stumbled in the darkness, and in the morning, on the rocks far down below, the grey waves lapped against the ashen dead face of a mighty king.
Not only was the fair Queen Yolande a widow. Scotland was widowed indeed. For long years thereafter she was to be a battlefield for fiercely contending nations, and if the ghost that danced at Jethart was truly a portent of the death of the King of Peace, it also was a portent of the death of many a gallant warrior and of much grievous spilling of innocent blood in the woeful years to come.
A MAN HUNT IN 1813
It was a clear, crisp, sunny day, early in March 1813, that the laird of Wauchope was riding into Hawick. A little snow still lay on the crest of Cheviot and on some of the foot-hills, and a smirr of hoar-frost silvered the turf by the roadside; but the sun was bright – strong to overcome frost and snow – and in it the leaves that still clung to the beech hedges shone like burnished copper.
Walter Scott of Wauchope was one of the most popular men in Liddesdale. He it was who had, by his own exertions, raised the Light Company of Roxburghshire Volunteers, a band of nearly a hundred men of fine physique and first-rate horsemanship, whose bearing was the admiration of everyone when the laird marched them into Hawick on that momentous night in 1804 when "Boney" was supposed to have landed on Scottish shores. Mr. Scott's services had not been forgotten. A captain's commission in the 1st Regiment of Roxburgh Local Militia now belonged to him, and he squared his shoulders with an air and gave the military salute to those on the road with whom he exchanged greetings.
It was a morning for only peace and goodwill to be abroad, and the laird rode on in cheerful frame, and put his horse to a canter along the turf. But as he cantered, the good steed's ears suddenly went back, he plunged, swerved, and answered his master's voice and heels by standing stock-still, staring affrightedly at what at first, to his rider, seemed a mere limp, inanimate bundle of old clothing lying half in, half out of the ditch. In a moment the laird was standing beside the mysterious heap, and found an old, white-haired man, grievously mishandled, with blood on his face, blood dabbling the dead leaves in the ditch, blood on the turf where the pure hoar-frost had lain. There was but little life left in him, and it was not easy for him to explain his sorry plight when the words came only with hard-fought breathing, hoarse and low.
"She will pe a pedlar," he said, "an' she will haf peen robbed and murdered… Och, so little she will pe hafing, and now all gone… Ochone, ochone!" Gently the laird put his questions to the dying man. The robbery had been committed only a short time before. The assailant was a big man – "a fery big man" – an Irishman, and he could not have gone far. Up again on his wondering steed sprang the laird, and at steeplechase pace rode on. Near Birney-knowe he came in sight of his quarry, a powerful six-footer, but carrying too much flesh to do more than a good sprint without failing. In a neighbouring field a ploughman with his pair of horses was turning up the rich brown loam. "Hup, Jess! Woa-hi, Chairlie!" sounded his cheerful voice from over the dyke, above the jingle of his horses' harness as they turned at the head-rig with their greedy following of screaming, white-winged gulls.
"Hi! Will Little!" shouted the laird. "Leave the plough, lad! There's murder afoot the day! Come and help catch the murderer!"
William Little, a handsome fellow of six feet, clean built and athletic, required but little explanation. In two minutes his pair was unyoked and tied to the beam of the plough, his coat off and cast at the back of the dyke, and as sturdy a pair of legs as any in Liddesdale had joined in the chase. The robber had not failed to hear the laird's shouts, and as Little unyoked his horses, he ran on, adding still more to the distance that already separated him from his pursuers. Clearly his best chance was to leave the high-road and get on to ground where it was impossible, or, at least, most unlikely, that a mounted man could follow him. Through hedges he clambered, vaulted dry stone dykes, leapt ditches, made somewhat heavy weather over the plough, but got away on rough turf up the hillside. The morning wore on, and both hunters and hunted wished that the sun had shone less warmly on that March day. On a steep part of High Tofts Hill, however, the chase at last came to an end. The steep face of the hill was more than the laird's good steed could manage, though nobly, in response to his call, did it do its best. He had to turn back and come round by a part where the ascent was less steep, while Little, hot but undaunted, went on with the chase alone. The robber's extra weight was telling on him, and he was not in the hard training of the young Border farmer. The hill pumped him, he stumbled as he ran, and, as Little gained on him yard by yard, he saw that he could run no longer, but must come to bay. He turned round and faced his pursuer, breathing hard, and with all his might tugging at a big butcher's knife in his pocket. Ordinarily the knife came easily to his hand, but he had forgotten that the pocket was stuffed with articles stolen from the old pedlar. The knife was hopelessly jammed, and Little was almost upon him. A large, sharp-pointed stone stuck out of the ground at his feet. "Keep off!" he yelled to the ploughman. "Hands off! or I'll scatter your brains!" And as he threatened, he stooped to seize the stone and make good his threat. But the Fates that day had signed the Irish villain's death-warrant. The good Border earth clung to the stone, refusing to let it go. With all his force he tugged and tugged, but ere the earth could give way, Little had thrown himself upon him, and when Mr. Scott appeared over the brow of the hill, the sturdy farmer was still holding his own with a kicking, biting, struggling, cursing ruffian who would have had no compunction in adding another to his list of victims that day. Between them, Little and the laird tied their captive's hands behind his back with part of the bridle reins, and walked him back to Kirkton. There help was sent to the old Highlander, but no doctor could undo the ill that had been wrought him, and he died a few days later. In one of the Kirkton farm-carts the old man's murderer was conveyed to Hawick, and from thence to Jedburgh jail. It was too much a case of "hot trod" for him to do anything but plead guilty, and he hung on a gallows at Jedburgh, as many a worthier man had done in earlier days. The laird lived for more than twenty years after his man hunt on that March day in 1813, and his worthy fellow-huntsman had no cause to forget his morning's work, for he was presented with a baton and relieved from paying taxes for the rest of his natural life.
LADY STAIR'S DAUGHTER
The story of the Bride of Lammermoor is one that all the world knows, but how many are there who realise that the tragedy which Sir Walter Scott's genius has given to the world is in truth one of the annals of a noble Scottish family? Possibly among all the "old, unhappy, far-off things" there is none more pitiful than the tale of the Earl of Stair's daughter and her luckless lover, Lord Rutherfurd.
They were never laggards either in love or in war, those Border Rutherfurds. "A stout champion," according to contemporary history, was Colonel Andrew Rutherfurd, Governor of Dunkirk, and afterwards of Tangier, ennobled for his doughty deeds in foreign lands under the title of Earl of Teviot, and when, in 1664, he was slain by the Moors, his distant relative, Lord Rutherfurd, inherited most of his fortune. Presumably the fortune was not great, and even in the old reiving days no Rutherfurd ever rolled in wealth. Moreover, Lord Stair was a staunch Whig, and Rutherfurd an ardent Jacobite, and so it was that when the young lord became a suitor for the hand of Janet Dalrymple, daughter of that famous lawyer, James Dalrymple, first Lord Stair, neither her father nor her mother smiled on his suit.
Sir James Dalrymple was made a baronet in the same year that Andrew Rutherfurd got his title, and both he and his wife, Dame Margaret, a daughter of Ross of Balniel, were ambitious folk. The worldly success in life of her husband and of all her family was what Lady Stair constantly schemed and planned and worked for. A clever, hard, worldly woman, with a witty and unsparing tongue, was Lady Stair, but obviously she was not a popular member of the society in which she lived, and when her plans succeeded in spite of all obstacles, there were many who were ready to say that she belonged to the blackest sisterhood of her day, and that to be "worried at the stake" and burned would only be the fate that she deserved.
Lady Stair's daughter was singularly unlike the mother who bore her, for the beautiful Janet Dalrymple was a gentle, shrinking, highly strung girl, who was like wax in the hands of one who ruled her household with a rod of iron. As a child her will had always had to bend to her mother's. Scarcely had she dared to hold an opinion on anything save under her mother's direction, and so when it came about that the tricksy god of love made her give her heart passionately and utterly to a man of whom her parents disapproved, poor Janet Dalrymple must have felt as though she were the victim of a sort of moral earthquake. Naturally she could see no reason why the man who in her eyes was peerless was not approved by her parents. Surely his politics did not matter. He had money enough for all their needs, and he would make her the Lady Rutherfurd; and, besides, what more could they want than just this – that he loved her and she loved him, and they would love each other until death – and after it.
These reasons given to a woman of Lady Stair's type were scarcely likely to be listened to with much patience, and Janet Dalrymple and Lord Rutherfurd soon saw that all their love-making must be done under the rose, and that they must wait as best they could for the obdurate parents to change their minds. Together they broke a gold coin, of which each wore a half, and solemnly called upon God to witness them plighting their troth, and together imprecated dreadful evils upon the one who should prove faithless. Doubtless Lady Stair was too clever a woman not to have a shrewd suspicion that her daughter's attachment to Lord Rutherfurd was something more than a mere piece of girlish sentiment; but if she did know, the knowledge did not overburden her. Obviously another suitor must be provided without loss of time. The expulsive power of a new affection must promptly be tried on the love-sick girl, whose pale face was in itself enough to betray the condition of her heart.
To Lord Stair belonged the credit of finding one who was approved of by Lady Stair as an entirely suitable match. David Dunbar, younger, of Baldoon in Wigtonshire, a solid young man with a good, solid fortune, was the son-in-law of their choice; and Lady Stair found no difficulty in getting him to see that her beautiful daughter was undoubtedly the right wife for him.
Contemporary history furnishes us with no description of Andrew, Lord Rutherfurd, but we learn from the Edinburgh printer who furnished the Dunbar family with an enthusiastic elegy on the death of David Dunbar of Baldoon that apparently he was a little red-faced man, ardently keen about agricultural pursuits, and deeply interested in the breeding of cattle and horses. Moreover, he was a student, well versed in modern history and in architecture, and with a good head for arithmetic (did he add up the figures of the fortune of Janet Dalrymple entirely to his own satisfaction?), and he had the additional amazing distinction chronicled by his eulogising biographer —
"He learned the French, be't spoken to his praise,
In very little more than forty days."
It is impossible to tell how much of the love story of the girl whom he proposed to make his wife was known to young Baldoon. Possibly he had had it lightly sketched to him by Lady Stair's skilled hand, as a mere girlish fancy, likely to be very soon past and already entirely on the wane. In any case, Baldoon evidently saw no more difficulties in the way of his nuptials than did Lord and Lady Stair. The fact that the bride "canna thole the man" must ever be a purely secondary consideration in such matrimonial arrangements. Meantime the unhappy bride-elect had the scheme laid before her, and in spite of her sobbing protests, was commanded to conform to the wishes of her parents.
The news of Lady Stair's triumph was not long in coming to Lord Rutherfurd's ears, and he at once wrote to Janet Dalrymple to remind her that she was pledged to him by everything that they both considered holy. No reply came from the unhappy girl, but a letter from Lady Stair informed the distracted lover that her daughter was fully sensible of the grave fault of which she had been guilty in entering into an engagement without the sanction of her parents, and that she now retracted her vows, and was about to give her hand to Mr. David Dunbar of Baldoon. Such an answer, written by the mother of his betrothed, and not by the girl herself, was scarcely likely to be received with meekness by one of the Rutherfurds of that ilk. Lord Rutherfurd demanded an interview with Janet Dalrymple, and absolutely declined to accept any reply that did not come to him from her own lips. It was a struggle between a high-spirited, determined man, deeply in love with her that he strove for, and a woman whose heart was as hard as her brain was keen, and who did not scruple to use any means, fair or foul, by which to gain her own ends. The lion and the snake are unequal combatants, and in this case the lion was worsted indeed. Lady Stair granted the interview, but took care that not for one moment was her daughter permitted to be alone with her lover. Lord Rutherfurd had many arguments that he had deemed unanswerable, but the lady's nimble wits and ready tongue found an answer for each one.
It must have been a strange scene that took place that day in the old mansion of Carsecreugh. The girl herself was present, but, had the tales of Lady Stair's dealings with the Evil One been true, she could not have substituted for her beautiful, happy daughter any witch-made thing that looked more lifeless than the poor, white-faced creature that sat with silent lips and down-cast eyes, terror-ridden, broken-hearted.
With every impassioned word he spoke Rutherfurd hoped to bring some sign of life to her, to glean a look from her eyes that showed that her love was still his, but he pled in vain. As for his arguments, Lady Stair could quote Scripture with any minister in the land, and the texts she hurled at him were fearful missiles for one who had not the book of Numbers at his fingers' ends.
"If a woman vow unto the Lord, and bind herself by a bond, being in her father's house in her youth; and her father hear her vow, and her bond wherewith she hath bound her soul, and her father shall hold his peace at her: then all her vows shall stand, and every bond wherewith she hath bound her soul shall stand. But if her father disallow her in the day that he heareth; not any of her vows, or of her bonds wherewith she hath bound her soul, shall stand: and the Lord shall forgive her, because her father disallowed her."
So quoted the pitiless voice. Even the devil, they say, can quote Scripture for his own ends. Finally, the mother, again telling Rutherfurd that her daughter acknowledged the wrongness of her conduct and desired to hold no further intercourse with him, turned to the white, marble creature, who seemed to hear nothing, to understand nothing, and commanded her to restore the broken half of the golden coin to him who had bestowed it. For the fraction of a second her icy fingers touched Lord Rutherfurd's, and yet she spoke no word.
To the fiery Borderer it was an insupportable situation. His temper went. The broken coin was cast to the ground, and with furious words he poured out on Lady Stair all his long pent-up anger. Then, turning to her who, so short a time before, had been all the world to him, he cast on her the curse, "For you, madam, you will be a world's wonder," and strode from the room, his face ablaze with wrath, black murder in his heart. Scotland was no longer a friendly home for Andrew, Lord Rutherfurd. He went abroad, and died there sixteen years later.
Meantime the preparations for the marriage of young Baldoon with Lord Stair's daughter went on apace. The bride showed no active dislike to the bridegroom her parents had provided, but behaved as a mere lay figure on which wedding garments were fitted, and which received with cold unresponsiveness all the attentions of the man who was to be her husband. When the wedding day – August 24th, 1669 – arrived, a large assemblage of relations and friends of both bride and bridegroom mustered at Carsecreugh. And still the white-faced lay figure mechanically went through all that was required of her, received the compliments and jests of the company with chill politeness, but with never a smile – a bride of marble, with a heart that had turned to stone. She rode pillion to church behind a young brother who afterwards said that the hand which lay on his as she held her arm round his waist was "cold and damp as marble." "Full of his new dress and the part he acted in the procession, the circumstance, which he long afterwards remembered with bitter sorrow and compunction, made no impression on him at the time."
Great were the festivities that Lord and Lady Stair had prepared for the wedding of their daughter with so eligible a suitor as the young laird of Baldoon, and when the ceremony in the church was over, there were great doings at Carsecreugh. Baldoon must either have been a very stupid man or a wilfully blind one, for his bride of snow seemed to look on everything that took place with vacant, unseeing, unsmiling eyes, and spoke and acted as one in a dream.
In the evening there was a dance. One can see the bright lights, the gaily-coloured wedding garments of the festive company, hear the sound of clarionet and of fiddle gaily jigging out country dances, and the loud hum of talk and laughter of the many guests. Baldoon, a proud husband, tricked out in all the finery of a bridegroom of that day, leads out his bride, the beautiful Janet, in her white bridal robe. Can he not feel the clammy chill of the little hand he takes in his? Why does he not understand the piteous look in the eyes of the girl whose feet are treading so gay a measure? No trapped bird with broken wing was ever more pitiful.
While the guests still were making merry, the bride and her bridesmaids went up to the bridal chamber. The virgins who prepared Iphigenia for her sacrifice had a task no less terrible. Then, amidst the animal jocularities that were looked on as wit in that day, the bridegroom followed, and the best man locked the door on the married pair and put the key in his pocket.
The dance went gaily on, but not for long. High above the sound of the violins, the laughter that grew more unlicensed as the night wore on, the sound of voices, the thud of feet, the tap of heels and rustle of brocades on a polished floor, came terrible shrieks and groans that made the heart of each wedding guest stand still. There could be no doubt from which room they came, and the panic-struck company dashed upstairs like a breakaway mob of cattle. The best man, livid-faced and with a shaking hand, unlocked the door, and on the threshold stumbled over the body of the bridegroom, terribly wounded and streaming with blood. At first they could see no bride, and then, in the corner of the wide chimney, they found her crouching, with no covering but her shift, and that dabbled with gore.
"She sat there grinning at them, mopping and mowing," so says Sir Walter Scott – "in a word, absolutely insane."
"Tak' up your bonny bridegroom!" she screamed, with hysterical laughter, and pointed mockingly at what seemed to be the corpse of young Baldoon.
Sick in body she was, as well as sick in mind, and on September 12th, 1669, a little over a fortnight from the day she was married, the Bride of Baldoon died.
David Dunbar of Baldoon recovered from his wounds, but during the thirteen years that remained for him to live, he declined to help the curious to elucidate the mystery of his attempted murder. In the words of Sir Walter Scott: "If a lady, he said, asked him any question upon the subject, he would neither answer her nor speak to her again while he lived; if a gentleman, he would consider it as a mortal affront, and demand satisfaction as having received such."
Many, of course, were the explanations given by the general public as to the real happenings on that tragic wedding-night. The majority inclined to think that the bride herself, crazed by grief at the loss of her lover, tried to kill her husband rather than be his wife in anything save legal formality. Others swore that the assailant was none other than the discarded lover, and that Lord Rutherfurd, having left Baldoon for dead, had escaped by the chimney where the unfortunate bride was crouching. But in those days there was bound to be yet another factor brought into the tale. Witches were held responsible for many a crime in Scotland in the seventeenth century, and of course Lord Stair's "auld witch wife" was adjudged guilty of the whole tragedy. In a sense, doubtless, so she was, but the description given by the credulous of how, on her marriage night, Janet Dalrymple was "harled" through the house by evil spirits in such a way as to cause her death shortly afterwards, is slightly at variance with the actual facts. Yet others there were who said that she who had sworn solemnly by all that was holy to keep her plighted troth with Andrew Rutherfurd, had obviously handed herself over, body and soul, to Satan when the troth was broken, and that he who would have slain David Dunbar was the Evil One himself.